Spiritual Food Quotes

“Abdomen, n. The temple of the god Stomach, in whose worship, with sacrificial rights, all true men engage. From women this ancient faith commands but a stammering assent. They sometimes minister at the altar in a half-hearted and ineffective way, but true reverence for the one diety that men really adore they know not. If woman had a free hand in the world’s marketing the race would become graminivorous.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ (1911)

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“The wine had such ill effects on Noah’s health that it was all he could do to live 950 years. Just nineteen years short of Methuselah. Show me a total abstainer that ever lived that long.”
Will Rogers (1879-1935)

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“Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ (1911)

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“Beware of people who don’t eat; in general they are envious, foolish, or nasty. Abstinence is an anti-social virtue.”
Grimod de la Reynière (1758-1838)

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“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet, essayist.
(1803-1882)

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“Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.”
George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright (1856-1950)

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“Money brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends.”
Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian playwright (1828-1906)

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“You first parents of the human race…who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you have done for a truffled turkey?”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)

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“Cookery is an old art, as it goes back to Adam.”
Marquis de Cussy

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“Ever since Eve started it all by offering Adam the apple, woman’s punishment has been to supply a man with food then suffer the consequences when it disagrees with him.”
Helen Rowland, English-American writer (1876-1950)

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“I have long believed that good food, good eating is all about risk. Whether we’re talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime ‘associates,’ food, for me, has always been an adventure.”
Anthony Bourdain, ‘Kitchen Confidential (2000)

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“Square meals, not adventurous ones, are what you should seek.”
Bryan Miller (NY Times Restaurant Critic)

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“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”
Laurie Colwin

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“You will never get out of pot or pan anything fundamentally better than what went into it. Cooking is not alchemy; there is no magic in the pot.”
‘Dishes & Beverages Of The Old South’
Martha McCulloch-Williams (1913)

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“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.”
Proverbs 31:6

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“In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love or very alone.”
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)
‘An Alphabet for Gourmets’ (1949)

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“Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other’s food.”
Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher

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“A human can be healthy without killing animals for food. Therefore if he eats meat he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.”
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
Russian author (1828-1910)

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“There is nothing like a plate or a bowl of hot soup, it’s wisp of aromatic steam making the nostrils quiver with anticipation, to dispel the depressing effects of a grueling day at the office or the shop, rain or snow in the streets, or bad news in the papers.”
Louis P. DeGouy, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)

“All things require skill but an appetite.”
George Herbert, English poet (1593-1633)

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“Appreciation is a wonderful thing; it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”
Voltaire

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“Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry gets the best of the argument.”
Richard Whately (1787-1863)

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“I abhor averages. I like the individual case. A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live.”
Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)
U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

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“An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.”
Albert Einstein

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“These ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind.”
Leviticus xi. 22

“Indigestion: A disease which the patient and his friends frequently mistake for deep religious conviction and concern for the salvation of mankind. As the simple Red Man of the Western Wild put it, with, it must be confessed, a certain force: ‘Plenty well, no pray; big belly ache, heap God.’”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’

“Hold your Council before Dinner; the full Belly hates Thinking as well as Acting.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’

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“If it were not for the Belly, the Back might wear Gold.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’

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“Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.”
Samuel Johnson, English writer, lexicographer, critic and conversationalist (1709-1784) Quoted in James Boswell’s ‘The Life of Samuel Johnson’

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“It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to bursting point on anything from quail financiere to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly.”
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)
‘An Alphabet for Gourmets’ (1949)

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“We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely, the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic.”
‘Numbers’ 11

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“Among the faithful, in the great kitchens of the world, Escoffier is to Careme what the New Testament is to the Old.”
Andre Simon (1877-1970),
‘The Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy’ (1952)

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“When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before thee:
And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite.”
‘Proverbs’ (c 23, v. 1-2)

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“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.”
‘Proverbs’ 31:6-7

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“Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?”
Job, speaking to God

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“The dinosaurs’s eloquent lesson is that if some bigness is good, an overabundance of bigness is not necessarily better.”
Eric Johnston

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“It is the man who drinks the first bottle of saké; then the second bottle drinks the first, and finally it is the saké that drinks the man.”
Japanese proverb

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“A boy doesn’t have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn’t like pie when he sees there isn’t enough to go around.”
E. W. Howe

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“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

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“Maybe a person’s time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food.”
Frank A. Clark